Why is it so Easy to Lie to Us? The Case of Russia and Climategate
Last week, I cited the Climategate story, noting how it was part of a wide-ranging anti-science propaganda effort and that it must have involved some professional hacking work to break into the server of the East Anglia University. On that point, I received a comment from “Andy Mitchell” that went as:
The Climategate hack has only one suspect: the Russian Petrostate. There are no other suspects.
Note the absolute certainty of this statement: it is a typical characteristic of legends. So, I thought it was intriguing enough to deserve a little examination.
The origin of the story of the involvement of Russian Secret Services with Climategate is easy to find: it is an article of the Daily Mail dated 6 December 2009. Then, debunking legends normally takes a little work but, in this case, it is remarkable how there is nothing to debunk: the Daily Mail article contains no facts, no evidence, no data.
You can read the article yourself, and you’ll be amazed at how obvious it is that it is something invented out of whole cloth. The only vague connection with reality is that the Climategate files may have been stored for a short time in Tomsk, a Russian town.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
